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Decorative drawing: an old roadside tavern with a deep porch and an empty iron bracket. Not a photograph of this place.

Tavener-Sears Tavern

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. A historic map-sheet match is not published yet. The record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.

From the record

one of 70 National Register listings in Muskingum County · listed in 1982 · category: Building.

Sources: the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service

The listing

  • What is counted as historic. The nomination lists 1 building as contributing to the listing.
  • Address. Main St., Mount Sterling, 43701
  • When was it listed? 1982-04-29
  • Category. building
  • Township. Hopewell township
  • National Register reference number. 82003621 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

The ground it stands on

8,900 words

This property stands in Hopewell Township. 1794. History of Muskingum County, Ohio, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Prominent Men and Pioneers, published 1882; History of Muskingum County, Ohio, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Prominent Men and Pioneers, published 1882 gives that township a chapter of its own.

The chapter covers the township.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Hopewell Township - 8,900 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.

Fires near this property

23 since 2012

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 23 fires within 5 miles of Tavener-Sears Tavern between 2012 and 2020, burning about 39 acres in total. None started naturally. 2 were recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause Fires
Debris and open burning13
Power generation/transmission/distribution3
Missing data/not specified/undetermined3
Equipment and vehicle use2
Arson/incendiarism2

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

DateCause SizeReported by Name on the report
1 September 2019Debris and open burningunder an acreOhio Department of Natural Resources15236
6 July 2020Debris and open burning1.0 acresOhio Department of Natural Resources15769
2 July 2018Power generation/transmission/distribution1.0 acresOhio Department of Natural Resources12325
19 June 2018Power generation/transmission/distribution1.0 acresOhio Department of Natural Resources12326
16 June 2020Debris and open burningunder an acreOhio Department of Natural Resources15749
10 June 2020Power generation/transmission/distributionunder an acreOhio Department of Natural Resources15752
16 May 2019Equipment and vehicle useunder an acreOhio Department of Natural Resources15210
21 April 2020Debris and open burningunder an acreOhio Department of Natural Resources15671

Every fire recorded in Muskingum County

Specimens collected near this property

12 of 265 shown

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. Museums hold 265 specimens collected within 10 miles of Tavener-Sears Tavern between 1873 and 1974: 208 Animalia, 32 Plantae, 17 Fungi, 5 Protozoa, 2 Unrecorded, 1 Chromista. 12 distinct Species records are shown. Collected by A.E. Miller, Bogue, E.E., Buker, W. and others. Each is a physical object with a catalogue number, and each entry opens the museum's record. This is what was collected and kept, not a survey of what lives here - nothing can be concluded from a species being absent.

Image SpeciesYear Collected by Where, as recorded
Specimen of Asplenium pinnatifidum Nutt.Asplenium pinnatifidum Nutt.1893Jones, H.L.Toboso
Specimen of Mesolobus Dunbar & Condra, 1932Mesolobus Dunbar & Condra, 1932 (fossil)1916Wilber StoutVanport. Hopewell Township
A photograph of the species Poa cuspidata, not of this specimenPoa cuspidata Nutt.1873W. M. CanbyZanesville.
A photograph of the species Fissidens adianthoides, not of this specimenFissidens adianthoides Hedw.1892W. C. WernerFultonham
A photograph of the species Lycogala exiguum, not of this specimenLycogala exiguum Morgan, 18931893Morgan A.P.Preston
A photograph of the species Cladonia symphycarpa, not of this specimenCladonia symphycarpa (Ehrh. ex Schrad.) Fr.1894Bogue, E.E.Black Hand
A photograph of the species Lysimachia quadriflora, not of this specimenLysimachia quadriflora Sims1894Moseley, E.L.Licking Gorge
A photograph of the species Smilax herbacea, not of this specimenSmilax herbacea L.1894Moseley, E.L.Licking Gorge
A photograph of the species Gyromitra brunnea, not of this specimenGyromitra brunnea Underw.1909Moore S. R.Zanesville
A photograph of the species Davainea Blanchard, not of this specimenDavainea Blanchard, 18911912E. GayJanesville
Aglaostigma Kirby, 18821920A.E. Miller
Macrophya Dahlbom, 18351920A.E. Miller

All 265 specimens within 10 miles, at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Mines and quarries near this property

1 within 5 miles

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists 1 working within 5 miles of Tavener-Sears Tavern: 1 occurrence. None of them still produces. What was taken out: Titanium, Silica, Iron, Aluminum. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Where SiteCommodity StatusRecorded
Brookville UnderclayTitanium, Silica, Iron, AluminumOccurrence1850

Every working recorded in Muskingum County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

From the nomination file

1,385 words on record

When this property was proposed for the National Register, someone wrote the case for it: what the building is, and why it matters. That document is a federal record in the public domain. It is quoted below word for word, never summarised. The text was read off the scanned case file by machine, so the occasional stray character is the recogniser's and the 1970s typewriter's.

Statement of significance

(in one paragraph) "any one was able to keep a tavern, and they sprang up along the line of the National Road as if by magic"(Everhart, p. 412). The 1841 tax records indicate that a frame and brick house was built in 1841. That year, John Tavener, a Virginian purchased the owned the property from 1855 through the 1870s and is listed in the 1860 census as R. Sears, on this site. in his 1948 The National Road, maintains that spaced almost mathematically, one to every seven to ten miles (p. 257).

This was true in Muskingum County, with several well-known (and long-gone) hostelries in Zanesville, the county seat, the Headley and Smith establishments five miles westward, and the Tavener-Sears Tavern five more miles to the West, at 1600-1699 1841 1700-1799 1400-1499 1500-1599 communications engineering transportation industry politics/government theater humanitarian Period invention 1900- conservation science Specific dates social/ Architecturally, the village of Mt. Sterling consists primarily of simple wood 4-26-78).These stone structures are located approximately five miles to the east Mt. Sterling. of Mt.

Sterling.The village was platted in 1829,one year before the National Road military other (specify) Areas of Significance-Check and justify below being the Headley Inn and the Smith House (listed on the National Register jointly on The Tavener-Sears Tavern is nominated as an early tayern on the National Road _sculpture _economics law -art - archeology-prehistoric - community planning . religion lot for $1200; the 1850 census lists him as an "innkeeper" Robert Sears (b. 1824) - between Zanesville and Columbus, taverns marked every section and as one of the very few brick structures from the period of settlement in the village Only two other brick buildings are in the village.

Read the complete 1,385-word case file.

The whole case file for this property - 1,385 words, 10 pages, reproduced complete.

Quoted from the National Register nomination for reference 82003621, 10 pages, held by the National Archives in Record Group 79. See the catalogue record.

Listed places nearby

6 within 8 miles

Other National Register properties close enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties to their map sheets.

Photograph PropertyDistance Listed
Tanner, William C., House3.9 miles1979
Muskingum River Lock No. 10 And Canal7.1 miles1978
Five Mile House7.1 miles1977
St. Nicholas's Catholic Church7.2 miles1975
McClelland, Harry S., House7.2 miles1980
Kearns, George and Edward, Houses7.2 miles1979

Sources for this property

National Archives recordThe nomination case file for reference 82003621 in Record Group 79.
Muskingum CountyAll 70 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

  • Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
  • Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
  • How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
  • Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
  • Specimens. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), https://www.gbif.org/. Only records licensed CC0 or CC BY are used. Records licensed CC BY-NC are excluded because this site carries advertising. Images are checked individually and any whose licence is non-commercial, no-derivatives or unreadable is refused.
  • Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.